Memo to Tom Cruise: the 80s are over. The decade of bad hair, cheesy grinning and toe-curling dialogue is long, long gone. Audiences now are bored with car chases, shooting lots of guns, running around European cities and dragging a dumb blonde in your wake. It’s been done, we’ve all moved on. This action thriller has to be one of the most tired, dated, cheesy, repetitive, flat, dull and just plain boring movies of the year. What’s more, even the audience it is aimed at – teenage boys – may well find its two leads far too old to appeal to them.
It follows the well-trodden formula of a Bond film – a mid-period Brosnan Bond film, not a Casino Royale – with Cruise as agent Roy Miller, who has gone ‘loco’ and turned to the dark side. He is carrying the macguffin, a AA battery that can power a small town and never runs out. Yeah, right. He has several ‘bad guys’ after him (his words), and uses Diaz’s June Havens as a mule to get the object through security. After they board a plane Roy takes out the entire crew, and becomes stuck with June as he zips around Europe trying to find the evil arms dealer who will buy the battery, while trying to protect its inventor, Simon (Dano, playing the same role he played in There Will Be Blood).
There follows some truly awful dialogue as Roy and June get it together, some dreary science bits and car chase after car chase after car chase. The effect is so mind-numbingly dreary it’s difficult to stay awake, let alone get the pulse rate up. Worse, the sequence where Roy takes June to his desert island and emerges, Craig-like from the water, looks like a bad Duran Duran video.
Cruise mugs his way through this dross, baring his teeth at every opportunity, flicking his hair in that irritating way and giving his pecs an airing whenever possible, all presumably to cover up the fact he has about as much screen presence as a jellyfish. As for Diaz, well, acting has never been her strong suit, but here she looks plain embarrassed most of the time. There’s a running ‘joke’ about her waking up in strange places, which wears thin quickly, and her relationship with a fireman, about the film’s only believable character, peters out to nothing. At least those two have a little spark, Diaz and Cruise have about as much chemistry as a physics lecture. Sarsgaard is here presumably to add some threat as the chasing baddie, but has way too little to do, and appears to be wearing the same clothes from An Education.
It’s difficult to know exactly where to lay the blame for this mess of a movie. Director Mangold has made the powerful Walk The Line and 3:10 To Yuma, but there have been poor test screenings of Knight And Day and rumours of reshoots right up to the film’s release. One sequence, with Cruise and Diaz riding through Seville on a motorbike during the bull run is technically well done, before you remember Seville doesn’t actually have bull runs through its streets. Similarly Vienna looks suspiciously like Prague, a much cheaper film venue.
The obvious scapegoat is writer Patrick O’Neill, an actor who was in Grosse Point Blank but has written nothing before or since this, and frankly it shows. When it tries to be witty it’s embarrassing, when it tries to be serious it’s funny, and not in a good way.
Knight And Day does prove one thing, Cruise is not a James Bond, or even a Roger Thornhill. It has been coolly received even in his solid fanbase, and who knows, maybe this is the beginning of the end. Straight into the top 10 worst films of the year.
Overall verdict: Dated, cheesy, overlong, turgid actioner that is well past its sell-by date and starting to hum.
Reviewer: Mike Martin
